How To Make a Vintage ‘Greetings From’ City Postcard

The design we’ll be creating in this tutorial is inspired by vintage “Greetings from” postcards those are popular in the mid 20th-century. Large letter of a city name with 3D effect, usually accompanied with a “Greetings from…” text, landscapes or landmarks as background and clipped in the large letter. You know it.

But, actually, I will show you how to use my fonts, Fonseca Grande, that has faux 3D effect using layered fonts. The typeface is equipped with Illustrator Actions & Photoshop Actions to help us create that 3D effect quickly. So let’s load the Actions on Adobe Illustrator, since I will use Adobe Illustrator for my starting layout of the postcard.

Load Actions in Adobe Illustrator

The Action set is shown below.

I made these fonts (and postcard) in Bali, so I said “Greetings from Bali” would be perfect.

First step, I will write ‘BALI’ and choose my color scheme ‘Fonseca Color 11’.
Additional update: If you kern your text, please do it in this first step.

We have to distort the text. I used Effect>Warp>Rise.

Additional update: To make sure the text composition doesn’t overlap during the design process (sometimes we transform the size, change the position, etc.) please create the text as outlines, or use the Expand Appearance feature.

Now I place my illustration as the canvas of this postcard.

Need some accompanying texts, right? Here we go.

I used Fonseca Script, which is included in the Fonseca Grande group. The swashy letter for ‘G’ and ‘m’ are provided as OpenType features. Also use the same warping effect as before.